Ruthlessness of rumor mill
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Woogon (Kim Kang-woo), center, joins the “information meeting,” a secretive world of information gatherers who come from every field of society such as financial firms, public relations agencies, government organizations and media. The information they gathered from their field of work is shared through this meeting and spread as “jjirasi.” / Courtesy of CJ Entertainment
By Yun Suh-young
Many filmmakers had been trying to make movies about the faceless people who author “jjirasi,” the secretive newsletters that navigate the sketchy underbellies of politics, business and showbiz, read voraciously by stock investors and journalists who pay for them.
But this has proved to be difficult as their profession requires them to be extremely elusive, leaving much of their lives and work a mystery.
Kim Kwang-sik’s “Tabloid Truth,” which recently opened in theaters, is the long-awaited first movie based on the murky world of private-information collectors.
Mixing reality and imagination, Kim convincingly dramatizes the ruthless competition between jjirasi writers and the destructive nature of their information, which is consistently fast but only occasionally accurate. This provides a template for a predictable but tightly made thriller that doubles as a vehicle for gloomy social criticism.
The movie opens with a dead actress. Mijin (Ko Won-hee), an A-list star, has apparently killed herself and that leaves her manager Woogon (Kim Kang-woo) scrambling to find the source of the malicious rumors surrounding her death.
Woogon finds himself an unlikely partner, Park Sajang, a mysterious jjirasi publisher, who is also suspicious about some of the reports on Mijin.
With the help of Park Sajang, Woogon is able to delve deep into the world of the secretive information-gatherers, who to his surprise come from every field of society, such as financial firms, public relations agencies, government organizations and even journalists in need of extra money.
He learns that this is a world with its own editorial process. Fact and fiction are selectively picked, processed and published to serve particular interests.
In pursuing what’s kept unpublished, Woogon cuts through a complicated web of power, money and sex, and inches closer to the ugly truth behind Mijin’s death, at the expense of his own safety.
Kim, whose last feature film was “My Dear Desperado (2010),” maintains an earnest and honest approach through this movie, which takes a little too long to come alive.
The intensity that takes hold later in the film is impressive and justifies Kim’s studious approach to some extent, but you have to wonder how many people in the theater will still be paying attention at that point.
And for all his painstaking attention to detail, Kim surprisingly leaves his protagonist lacking in character depth. Woogon’s doggedness in investigating the death of Mijin is never clearly explained.
Kim, the director, said jjirasi has always been a subject that fascinated him.
“I thought jjirasi would be a great theme to tie together social events and provide an opportunity to reflect on our society,” Kim said.
“I had difficulty trying to get in touch with the people who are involved in the making of jjirasi because they don’t want to reveal themselves.
“Luckily I got in touch with a distributor and an ‘information collector’ who attended the information meetings. Through them, I could get the big picture of how a jjirasi was created. But other than the part about jjirasi, the events depicted in the film are fiction.”